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Objective-C, using my own API wrapper (focused on easy UI concurrency and state caching/update). As of 2010-07-23, you can get big chunks of code from the open source page. I'm also writing a few blog posts that new API users might find useful.

Incredible. Did you use any third party frameworks for the UI element that you can share?
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Joost SchuurJun 27 '10 at 3:53

No, it's all either standard UI stuff or custom views. As an update, It was pretty much ready for release, then the iOS 4 GM candidate dropped and for some reason, my concurrent updates are now crashing (in a most hideous heisenbug fashion, and what seems like deep inside the APIs - though I'm sure it's my fault somehow). Whilst a good excuse for me to do the redesign of the update engine that I've wanted, it will delay release until I've had the weekend it will need to do it. Bah!
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Adam WrightJun 28 '10 at 11:21

I like what I see in your video ... UI feels familiar and the navigation looks really good! For your concurrent issue, check this thread in the apple dev forums: devforums.apple.com/message/242065
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kenoJun 29 '10 at 15:27

This looks great; I look forward to having it on my iPhone!
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Kevin YJul 4 '10 at 5:23

Are you still working on this? When do you plan on submitting it to Apple?
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Matt S.Jul 9 '10 at 23:37

Yup, still working. Now we're at 1.0, I can finish the API interface rewrite, which is specced but unwritten. I need to find 2 solid days of work before it's ready for a beta. I'd still like to get it out to people before the 1st Aug - though that might not be in the App Store, depending on beta feedback and review length.
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Adam WrightJul 10 '10 at 14:39

Man, that is smokin and smooth. I give you a + with attitude. Great work. oops, already upped it. guess i liked it then too. ;-)
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Sky SandersJul 21 '10 at 14:45

1

Looks great, though one little thing, when tracking a user in the video there are hundreds of users called Jonathan (I know this as I have tried another app that uses a similar method) and I couldn't find myself so would it be possible to enter the user's id on that site and search for a user with that instead of the name.
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Jonathan.Jul 27 '10 at 14:04

15 Answers
15

Don't let this list scare you. Most of the items are minor annoyances or suggestions for improvement. I believe I found just 1 bug. Overall, the app feels polished. It is easy to use. The UI and general flow of the app makes sense. Nice work!

I've separated items by view in hopes of some form of organization.

Setup site

Track user: Perhaps it could default to filling in the last user searched.

Consider allowing multiple sites to be selected at once and use associated accounts to add the same user on the associated sites.

adamw : Good idea on these two. I'll certainly add the first, which should make the experience a lot better for little effort. In general, I think I need a better "Site add" UI in general for people with the same user on multiple sites.

Currently the user search is done first and it always searches on SO. Maybe the UI could be reworked so that the site is selected first and then the user is searched so that the gravatar and rep are shown for the correct search in the site. (Not sure how this would play well with adding multiple sites at once.)

adamw : Adding new sites does default to SOF, but you can pick a new site first then search for a user. I'll change the UI so that when you toggle sites, previous user searches are invalidated.

Your sites

Consider allowing sites to be reordered.

adamw : Absolutely. Not sure why I didn't do this first off, frankly.

Going from a site to Your Sites and then back into the site loses the active tab. If I'm in SO viewing Questions, click Your Sites, then enter SO again, it is back on the User tab. Suggested behavior is that it would load the Questions tab again.

adamw : This is a nice idea. I'll implement some kind of tab persistence for this.

Going from a site to Your Sites and then back into the site loses the active sort for Questions/Favorites. This could be a related symptom to the above. Suggestion behavior is that if I was on Newest Questions before I go back to Your Sites, that's what I should see when I go back into the site.

adamw : Again, a nice idea. I'll add this when I add the above.

User

New comment: consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.

Post revision: consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.

adamw : Hmm, both of these should already happen. I'll file this as "bug" and look into it

Question activity: consider saying "Asked" or "Answered". (I only have answers in my recent activity so I'm not sure if a question I asked would be labelled as "Question Activity".)

adamw : Good idea :)

Reputation: Selecting an item under the reputation graph takes you to the wrong post. The title listed on the User view is correct. The post it takes you to is the incorrect piece. This affects all reputation items I have listed, not just one. This also affects other users.

adamw : This is a bug due entirely to my stupidity, and breaking of my cardinal rules. I fixed another bug very late in development, involving reordering those posts. I then failed to take this in to account in the UI selection routine. I'll have this fixed in the next release.

Mentions: consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.

adamw : I'll certainly change to this, yes.

Consider priority of sections. When I look at my User page, I know what actions I've taken on the site. What I want to see first are things I didn't do, reputation probably moreso than mentions.

adamw : Probably true. I suspect the best way to fix this is to allow people to reorder the user page for their tracked user to whatever pleases them.

Badges: Able to select/highlight a badge, but it doesn't navigate anywhere. The highlight response to tapping it seems to indicate an action as a response (perhaps what post the badge was awarded for?).

adamw : The selection ability is a bug - currently, there's no "Badge viewing" in the app. I will be adding this in the next release, so it will make more sense then.

Site statistics seems out of place at the bottom of the User view.

adamw : Yes, I suppose it does. I rather ran out of places to put that. I'll ponder on a better place for that.

If I view another user by tapping on their name on a post, and then go in a view their activity, clicking the User button in the upper left takes me back to my User page, not the user I was on. (This doesn't happen every time. It only manages to happen when I'm not paying attention and taking notes on my exact path. I'll work on getting you details.)

adamw : This is very odd, and shouldn't be possible. The views are maintained as a stack, and going "back" just pops the top of it. You shouldn't be able to go back to anything other than the view you left from, so I'd love repro steps for this.

Viewing Post

Consider adding an indication of whether an answer is accepted.

adamw : This should also already happen. The top bar of the post view should say "Accepted answer" and be in green.

I've got a comment showing it is from 0 hours ago but it is from 13 hours ago. A day later, it shows "an hour ago". I've found a few other comments that are not timestamped properly, but most of them are.

adamw : Hmm, this is strange. It may be bad data from the API, or a bug. I'll investigate.

Their answers: Consider adding the title of the question. This view could desperately use the identifying information of the title otherwise you're not sure what you're looking at.

adamw : Yes, this is not good. I'll find some way of wangling that in there for 1.1

Questions

What is the red icon underneath the number of votes?

adamw : The number of answers the question has.

Consider indicating whether the question has an accepted answer.

adamw : I'd like do this, but it's a case of working out the best way of fitting it into the UI. I shall ponder on it

Consider adding indication of important/ignored tags on the list of questions

adamw : This will come in v1.1 with better tag integration

Favorites

Consider indicating whether the question has an accepted answer.

adamw As above, I'll do this once I find a nice UI track to reveal it.

Search

Inputting a tag with [] does not do a tag search.

Consider providing a UI to search/autocomplete tags.

Consider providing a UI to add the other search parameters besides accepted answer.

adamw : All coming in v1.1. I've been writing the new tag filtering UI. It has shiny Core Animation effects :)

Consider adding the ability to save searches.

adamw : Good idea, I shall do this.

Taking saved searches a step further, this could be a good opportunity for watch lists, push/badge functionality. (For instance, an easy way to view questions tagged c# with 0 upvoted answers.)

adamw : Push notification is coming in a future version (probably not 1.1, but 1.2). I've not quite decided the best form for it - ensuring it's useful (i.e. tells you when you something is new), without being annoying (i.e. you just read it on your desktop).

Landscape View

Setup site is only a portrait screen.

adamw : Yes. I'm not sure what value having this in landscape would provide, other than consistency. I might add that, but it's low priority.

Rotating back to portrait (at least in Viewing Post) does not resize the display correctly, so the font is still bigger and I can't pinch to zoom it down to fit. (Pinch to zoom could be useful across the app. One post I looked at had an image in it that I could not see and was unable to zoom.)

adamw : This seems to be a bug in the UIWebView webkit embedding. It only seems to happen in some situations regarding the size of the original content, so I've only replicated it occasionally. I shall investigate and find a solution.

Question view: The "Question" button takes up a lot of precious screen real estate leaving very little room to show answers. Only 1 row is visible at a time, and only the answers grid can be scrolled such that you can only ever see 1 answer listed at a time. Being able to scroll isn't as important in portrait mode, but would be very helpful in landscape mode.

adamw : Agreed. I'll find a fix for this.

Consider adding a Tags item to the TabStrip bar (and the appropriate functionality of course :p)

adamw : This is a priority v1.1 feature.

Thoughts on any push or badge functionality? (Rep changes, new mentions, new items in saved searches, etc)

adamw : Oh yes. I've experimented with several concepts. but want to get this right first time. It has a high potential to be very annoying if done wrong. I'll probably write a blog post about it.

Regarding 'consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.': Without this, one might be unsure whether the comment was on the question or one of the answers. You have to go select the various items to look for the comment.

@Adam, I'm not sure I'd invalidate previous searches given that you check the association when a new site is selected. The order of the UI - user > site - seems backwards to me. Selecting the site first and then the user seems to be a better flow. Thanks for the speedy responses.
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Rebecca ChernoffAug 2 '10 at 0:04

@Matt, we have some beta testers who submit reports like that. It's brilliant when you have just one tester, but when you have 10 testers submitting lists that long it's demoralising :( But I agree, great testing!
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Mark HendersonAug 5 '10 at 0:14

@Adam, the ability to page questions would be nice too. When I'm catching up in the morning I often find myself wishing I could load the next page of questions.
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Rebecca ChernoffAug 5 '10 at 15:05

Overall design could be improved - I guess you already know that, though. What especially annoys me is the icon.

adamw : Oh, I know - especially about the icon. But damnit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. And despite the plethora of open source code for people who can't/don't have the time, there's very limited decent "open source" art. I also don't have any budget to pay for someone to make a nice icon.

eWolf : I almost assumed that. Just wanted to give all possible feedback.

Instead of showing an alert when opening the app the first time, why not direct the user to the view to setup a site immediately?

adamw : Hmm, I could do this. I erred on the side of an explanation - a big UI popup with no context can be scary. I shall consider this.

Why not allow users to choose multiple sites at once to setup?

adamw : This is a good idea, and I'm looking into it. Alas, it makes life complicated with respect to the "user tracking" feature. If you select a site then track a user, it would have to whittle this list down to just the sites that can be tracked. If you've already selected more than one site, what happens to the UI if the user is found on one but not the other? I need to ponder on the best way of doing it.

eWolf : You're right. I'm just criticising and you gotta take care of the details, haha :-P

Questions/answers per minute shows 0.0 on Stack Apps. Is there really so little going on here or is this a bug?

adamw : Not a bug, it's just that quiet around here. We get less than a half dozen posts a day, in my experience, which the API is rounding down to 0.

Why not show the question text when tapping the question title, instead of wasting space with a big button?

adamw : Good idea. I shall be improving the initial "Question view" in 1.1 to give more context about the question itself.

It's not really obvious to me that hitting the blue arrow opens the author's profile. Maybe you could just split the list item and create a second one for the author, which open his page when being tapped regularly?

adamw : I thought this was a pretty standard iPhone convention for detail disclosure in list items? I'll ponder :)

eWolf : It is. What I don't find clear is that the opened view refers to the author, and not the question which is represented by the list item. I just noticed that you placed the blue arrow on the height of the author name - but still, I don't like it :-/

On the answer page, the author's profile is opened by tapping on the author's name. This is inconsistent.

adamw : Agreed, but this is a deliberate choice, for space expediency. To make it UI consistent, I'd have to fence off a lot more UI space there to be consistent with the detail disclosure button. There's a redesign of the entire header section of the post view coming soon though, which might help me do this.

When you scroll through a user's badges or a question's answers, only part of the view can be scrolled. It would be nice to see the whole page moving, so one can use the maximum space for viewing the content one wants to, when the list is long enough.

adamw : I actually prefer it the way it is. Seeing the user name and question title persistently is, in my opinion, more useful.

I hope my feedback helps you. Oh, and asides from the flaws listed in my answer, your app is pretty awesome! ;-)
- adamw : All feedback is great, and thanks for taking the time to give it :)

Thanks for going through my list. I added some respones to your reponses..
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eWolfAug 3 '10 at 19:30

Oh, I'm glad to. Feedback from real users is the way to improve programs after a while. The author and friends become blind to flaws, and indurated against alternate ways of doing things. I'm always happy to receive sincere feedback, and always have beer money for anyone I run into who's sent me some ;)
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Adam WrightAug 3 '10 at 19:43

Just downloaded it. It looks pretty cool, EXCEPT it crashed within about 10 seconds of me using it. I just emailed you the crash log. Even though I'm running 4.1, it looks as if it's not a problem with the OS

Thanks for the feedback! This is the first post beta crash report, and I can't immediately see the cause from the crash log. Is it repeatable? I'm marginally suspect of the 4.1 beta - Six to Eight is entirely untested on it, it is unsupported, and Apple have a penchant for breaking things. I shall, of course, investigate. I'm sure I'm to blame somehow :)
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Adam WrightAug 4 '10 at 20:41

I haven't been able to duplicate it. But I suspect two things (now that I've played with your app some more). 1) the memory thing I emailed you about OR 2) You don't have error detection when the API returns something unexpected (like a random null value)
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Matt S.Aug 4 '10 at 22:24

1

if it helps - I tried using the app the other day when the API was down and the app did gracefully let me know there was an error, potentially the API was down and to try again later.
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Rebecca ChernoffAug 4 '10 at 23:01

Official bug reports

In this post, I'll agreegate known bugs in the v1.0 of the app. For education and entertainment, I'll also explain those that I can - what caused them, and why. If you need to report a bug, please either add a comment here or send me an e-mail (adamw at archgrove dot co.uk).

Bugs in v1.1

Not sure how this one occurred, since the code is the same since version 1.0. Either the API response has subtlety changed (unlikely), or when fixing another bug in CoreStack, I accidentally set the wrong response parsing system code for user favourites. It's fixed in my private version already, and will be in the next release.

Old bugs from version 1.0 (fixed in v1.1)

Tapping a row in the reputation changes section of a user generally shows the wrong post

This is because I violated my cardinal rule - don't change functionality in the hour or two before release. At the last minute, I finally realised I hated the way I was ordering the reputation update lists. I changed the sort ordering for display, but failed to account for it in the UI selection code.

It slipped through my tests because the user I checked against had a very small number of recent rep changes, and didn't trigger the bug. I was also probably not comparing what I tapped too closely against what appeared due to the last minute nature of the change (hence my cardinal rule).

API Advice - don't just test against one or two users, test against several with distinctive user patterns (i.e. include rare/retired users, and Jon Skeet level users - not just your own!).

Posts changed between 1 hour and 3 days ago will claim to be changed "an a hour ago"

This is a flaw in the date calculation code, which I've uploaded to http://sixtoeightapp.com/code/DateExtensions.m for the amusement of all. The inequality for the "an hour ago" conditional has been accidentally set as 60 * 60 * 90, and should be 60 * 90. A simple copy/paste error (still a bit embarrassing, though). Interestingly, this is a fantastic example of the need for better static code analysis. The later inequality (23 * 60 * 60) can never fire, and this should be flagged by the compiler.

API Advice - The reason this snuck through both my tests, and virtually all beta testers and public release testers is that most people use Stack Overflow, which updates faster than than a sysadmin installing Windows XP from an original disc. As such, it's quite plausible that everything you're looking at was updated an hour ago, so noone noticed that the 2 hours -> 3 days date range was simply missing. I advise testing against some quieter sites (meta.superuser.com has a sedate but active update rate, as does here).

The app sometimes crashes when viewing a post (unconfirmed)

I have one report of this bug, but not with repeatable steps. I can't replicate it earlier, but I'm sure it happened to the user. I'm still investigating this one.

The visit support alert doesn't take you to support

Indeed not. No excuse for this one except bone headedness, I'm afraid.

Each time you reload the Site Statistics page, the box at the top grows by about a pixel. (Screenshot) I noticed this while reloading repeatedly waiting for the 1999999th question.
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Jeremy BanksAug 28 '11 at 22:27

@Jeremy Wow, bizarre buglet :). Thanks for the report, I shall fix it in the next release. At the moment, I'm trying to find time to integrate the most requested feature - push notifications. Getting that right is a fiddly issue, but I'll conquer it at some point!
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Adam WrightAug 29 '11 at 12:22

:( now it requires 4.1. I can barely catch up ;) does the update use a feature specific to 4.1 or could you lower the base OS to 4.0 again. If you can just do it on the next update? at least I finally have it on my phone :)

I can probably work around and make it run in 4.0 for the next release. I can certainly see reticence in upgrading from 3.x to 4, but 4 to 4.1 is really just "plug in, wait 30 minutes whilst having coffee & danish, unplug". The upgrade stats suggest to me that most people have already done so, and some of the bug fixes are compelling, so I'd encourage you to upgrade regardless of Six to Eight.
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Adam WrightOct 24 '10 at 17:47

I would but my phone doesnt seem to like upgrading it freezes and then you have to un plug it and start the upgrade again for like 3 times. Besides I can't be bothered with the more complicated jailbreak for 4.1 :) Isn't making available on 4.0 as simple as setting the iPhone OS deployment target to 4.0 in the project info?
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Jonathan.Oct 24 '10 at 20:14

Hopefully :). I do need to retest everything, but I'll do my best to make the change for the next version. I'd not considered jailbreaks, which is a good reason to stay behind (I guess, I've not tried it :).
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Adam WrightOct 24 '10 at 22:22

And for those of us with a (perfectly good, working) early iPod Touch this is another of the cool apps we can't use since (as far as I know) I can't go beyond 3.x :-( It seems all technology has a shelf-life of only a few years these days - even if it isn't broken! Of course, I hasten to add that this is hardly the author's fault!
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user4988Jan 27 '11 at 14:09

I finally got around to upgrading to iOS 4 and can now use Six to Eight. But I type in Jonathan to the user tracker, and I can't find myself. As the Jonathan with lowest rep has about 700, I've just added a bounty to a question and now have only 400 rep. I can find myself on Stack Apps however, so it would be nice if either I could just type on my user I'd or the app used stackauth to find my other accounts.

This is a fair point, and I confess it had slipped my mind from beta testing. V1.1 is in the review queue now, but I'll squeeze a fix into the next version. Sorry!
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Adam WrightOct 18 '10 at 22:40

Well whenever you get the chance, there's no rush :) in the mean time I just changed my username temporarily. I think it's because it only shows the first 30 users.
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Jonathan.Oct 19 '10 at 6:48

Just to let you know I don't request this anymore. I got an iPhone 4 fory birthday so it came with 4.1 and a warranty. The changes are great and the icon is definitely better :)
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Jonathan.Oct 29 '10 at 1:08

Hi Adam. Great work with releasing CoreStack. I'm giving it a whirl in an iPad app I am creating. It might be worth pointing, in the readme, which apple frameworks are required to be linked into your application. It took me a good while to work out that I needed to add SystemConfiguration.framework. Anyway, keep up the good work! Jon

Sorry if this has already been mentioned (there are soo many answers!), but I think that I found another bug in Six to Eight. When you tap refresh, the TextView containing the Q&A Site info, expands downwards. Here's what I mean:

Regular StackOverflow Site View:

After tapping "Refresh" a few times:

After tapping "Refresh" a bunch of times:

I also have one other bug: When I try to track my profile at AskDifferent (Apple StackExchange), my profile gets refreshed, but then I get an error that says to make sure the site still exists (which it does). Thanks! Love the app! Keep up the great work!

I really want to be able to track myself with this app but I won't show up under the user search. I did a search on the website and compared it to the search in the app, and only a very small number of members show up in the app compared to the website. Is there a way to fix this or do I need to wait for an update?

Thanks for this - I'll look into it ASAP.
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Adam WrightOct 8 '12 at 10:28

@AdamWright too bad that you apparently have not been able to look into this (so far). It's still an issue e.g. on iPhone 5 under iOS 6.0.1. It's probably easy too solve (top of crashed thread's core dump reads: EXC_BAD_ACCESS ... [UIScrollView removeFromSuperview] + 60 ... __CFRunLoopDoTimer + 270. Haven't been (able to) use(d) the app in a while now and so it has lost quite a bit of its shine (for now).
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DruxDec 11 '12 at 7:13

1

sorry about this. I'm writing my PhD thesis at the moment, which is a bit of a time sink! I've done the debugging tonight and think I've squashed this, as well as a couple of other bugs. I've also added iPhone 5 screen size support as a bonus. If it survives a couple of days of field testing, I'll send it to the store for app review.
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Adam WrightDec 12 '12 at 22:14

@AdamWright thanks and very luck with the thesis! (If necessary, you could always open-source the app, which I'll presumably come to like again :)
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DruxDec 12 '12 at 23:08

1

et al, FYI, 1.2 is now in the review queue with a fix for this. Hopefully, it'll be dealt with before Christmas.
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Adam WrightDec 17 '12 at 13:32

Excellent -- thanks for this and again, good luck for the remaining work on the thesis!
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DruxDec 17 '12 at 14:34

Just got new version 1.2 from the app store. All is well again. Big re-thx.
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DruxDec 20 '12 at 22:48